all right let's go ahead and get started
so thanks everyone for joining welcome
to our webinar for today on what's new
in google analytics 4 in 2022
uh our agenda for today is we're gonna
do a webinar around all of the kind of
recent updates that google's done
uh in 2022 so really probably in the
last three to six months i'm going to
cover all the core features and updates
and then at the end of our webinar uh
i'll stay on as long as people have
questions so as we go through the
webinar we have some folks from adswerve
that are here to answer your questions
and then we'll have plenty of time to do
live q a at the at the end as well but
before we get started with any of that i
also wanted to kind of go through some
of the recent announcements obviously
about the deprecation of universal what
that means kind of why that's happening
and then kind of get to our live uh demo
and then kind of get to our live uh demo
and then kind of get to our live uh demo
portion
portion
so before we do that just a quick a bit
of information about me so for those who
haven't met me my name is charles i've
been working with oddswhere i think for
over eight years now i'm deeply
experienced in the google marketing
platform especially on the analytics
platform especially on the analytics
side
side
i've had the opportunity to both train
and implement google analytics on
hundreds of enterprise clients
including tesla gopro zoomies and many
including tesla gopro zoomies and many
others
others
and i'm deeply experienced in kind of
and i'm deeply experienced in kind of
the 360 and enterprise version and for
the past probably two years uh ever
since app plus web which is now ga4 was
an alpha and beta
i've been testing it helping our clients
kind of adapt it
and also working with google to improve
the product along the way
so excited to be here to share all my
so excited to be here to share all my
knowledge
knowledge
behind the scenes we also have a few ad
servers as i mentioned who are available
to answer chat or questions as we go
to answer chat or questions as we go
through
through
through
again i'm gonna do a live q a at the end
but feel free to ask questions at any
time during our webinar in the chat
feature and our team or i will try and
assist you either during or after
and then uh just another fun fact
besides doing analytics which probably
takes up uh 50 percent of my time the
other 50 percent of my time i spend
playing hockey i recently started a new
team called dumpster fire and you can
definitely tell from the statistics from
the season that our team has a literal
dumpster fire
dumpster fire
in every way
but i'm really proud of these jerseys we
were voted the best jerseys in the
league so i uh breathe and live
analytics and hockey that's that's what
i do
so for today as promised our agenda what
i'd like to do is do a quick refresh on
ga4 versus universal so before we get
into our live demo i thought it would be
important to talk about the recent
announcements as well as talk about some
of the key differentiators between ga4
and universal
and universal
after i do that i'm going to take you
through all of the new features and
updates and i've organized them into
three key areas we're going to cover the
integrations and there's some really
exciting improvements that i feel like
google's made especially for products
like google optimize and even google ads
which i'll cover
uh in addition we're gonna go through
some of the core feature updates those
are mainly gonna probably be around
attribution uh predictions as well as
new modeling features for both privacy
new modeling features for both privacy
and conversions and then as an outro
i'll also introduce you all to some new
features that are only available in the
enterprise version
just to
kind of show you what those are and why
those are important so we'll talk about
roll-ups and subs
but for those of you who are new to ga4
it's important to know that google
analytics 4 is a brand new version of
google analytics it's completely
different than the universal or the
version that all of us have been using
for the last 15 years
for the last 15 years
it has a different data model has a
different ui
and pretty much everything about it is
different the only thing that's really
similar about it is when you log into
the platform like as we're looking at
ga4 at first the theme and maybe some of
the colors and even a few of the reports
feel similar
but as soon as you take a close look
into anything in ga4
it's gonna start to immediately become
clear it's a drastically different
experience and product than the previous
experience and product than the previous
version
version
version
and the reason google's doing this is
because a fun fact is the original
tracking code the urchin.js version of
google analytics you can still implement
the javascript code from 15 years ago
and it still works today which is kind
of crazy
and the hard part about that is there's
many things today in google analytics as
much as we all love the tool that don't
much as we all love the tool that don't
necessarily
necessarily
work in kind of the the model and the
way our users interact with us today
so as an example conversions in google
analytics conversions are all session
based if someone watches for videos that
conversion can only count once per
session you don't have user-based goals
and you can't have goals that kind of
and you can't have goals that kind of
are
are
count so it counts every time a user
does an action
additionally goals are very rigid you
only ever had 20 of them
you can't really do things like seasonal
or campaign-based goals
there's other things that have never
made sense about google analytics like
if you ever tried to use a page the
dimension your page
with a metric like sessions
the schema and the way that data models
the schema and the way that data models
worked
worked
doesn't allow that kind of scoping to
work it actually
will actually give you incorrect data if
you mixed a session scoped metric with a
page scoped dimension so there's all of
these oddities all these things a lot of
power users have wanted out of google
analytics and kind of the legacy of the
back end of google analytics has really
i think prevented a lot of that from
kind of coming
and then in addition all of you are
probably well aware of all the privacy
challenges so long story short google
analytics 4 is built to kind of have a
new data model that's event driven which
is similar to many other platforms that
other marketing systems work
and behind that is tons of enhancements
and new features
and hopefully uh in 12 months from now
as we get closer to the date of
deprecation so if you haven't heard
about this
in the free version of google analytics
as of july of next year you can no
longer send additional data to the old
version of google analytics so the
processing will stop
you'll still be able to access the data
inside the reports for a period after
july but effectively as of july you'll
no longer be able to send new data so
the reason ga4 is such a hot topic right
now is because
it's very important right now to
implement it ideally as quickly as
possible to start building historical
data so that come july of next year you
can do your year-over-year analysis take
advantage of all the updates and
features that google's continuing to
work on
and be well positioned to transition
from universal to ga4
when the time comes
so with that what i thought i'd do real
quick before we go into our new feature
quick before we go into our new feature
demo
demo
demo
is i'll just do a quick refresh of three
key features that i think differentiate
ga4 from universal that you should be
most excited about
so the first feature that i love about
ga4 is that google's completely rebuilt
the concept of time or engagement so for
any of you that have used universal
analytics for a long time you've
probably realized that unfortunately
google analytics doesn't do a good job
of measuring time
of measuring time
like at all so it has time metrics it
can measure time per page it can measure
time per session
and you can even get it to do time per
and you can even get it to do time per
user
user
but what it's incapable of really doing
is measuring time per action so as an
example when did someone start reading a
blog post
and then start watching a video or if
you're e-commerce when did they start
their checkout and when did they
complete their checkout
or if you're b2b when do they start
filling out a form and when do they
finish filling out that form
and then in addition time has always
been measured between interactions in
google analytics
so if someone uh went to your home page
and then went to lunch for 20 minutes
and then came back
and did something google analytics would
record 20 minutes of time even though
they weren't engaged with your website
at all
so ga4 has a new concept of engage time
so ga4 has a new concept of engage time
where it only tracks the actual
interactions or basically when your
mouse is doing something on the website
so as an example of this we have a
completely rebuilt concept of time
that's substantially more powerful
than the
universal version or the previous
version of google analytics so an
example of this is going to be inside
the funnel report so funnels is kind of
a bonus for anyone that's never used ga4
that means you've never been able to
build a funnel in google analytics
build a funnel in google analytics
because the previous version of google
analytics and the free version really
doesn't have funnels at all
so in this enterprise version
or sorry in this ga4 version what we can
do is we can build funnels from the
scratch and i'll show you a quick
example of how time comes into play so
we could come in we can build a funnel
and then we can just define our steps
and in these funnels you can do whatever
steps you want so as an example we could
steps you want so as an example we could
say
say
i want to look for anyone that was on a
i want to look for anyone that was on a
certain page of our website so maybe
i'll say for adswurf i want to look at
anyone that saw a blog post
and then i want them to perform some
sort of other action and i could have
this be another event another page view
pretty much anything i'm tracking about
these users so in here i'm gonna use the
page location dimensions
so the first dimension will be that page
location contains blog
and then this will be any blog page they
looked at
and maybe i'm interested in how many of
and maybe i'm interested in how many of
those got to maybe our about section or
even better maybe i want to see
how many people after viewing our blog
looked at our contact page so i'll hit
apply over here
and you'll see on the right hand side it
builds out our funnel
and the cool part about this is i should
have first named these so we'll say this
is blog this is contact so this is
easier for you to read
but now i have my simple funnel and with
one step one check i can turn on this
new feature of show elapsed time
and google will instantly calculate the
elapsed time so on average how much time
did it take our users from reaching our
blog and for those that did get to our
contact page how much time did it take
and you can see here on average it's
three days so most users who get to our
contact page don't immediately come from
our blog they're obviously doing it in a
later visit in the future
so if you think about the power of this
for e-commerce for just measuring time
for e-commerce for just measuring time
in general
this is a huge improvement that we have
in ga4 over universal
so another quick feature that is really
important in ga4 is going to be those
improvements to conversion tracking that
i mentioned so conversions or goals in
google analytics i think are
very antiquated and we talked about that
remember goals in the previous version
of google analytics only increment once
per session
and in addition they're really basic you
can only have a goal that's based off of
a page like a url
or an event you can't make goals off of
audiences or dimensions they're only
based off of an event condition or a
based off of an event condition or a
page
page
so let me show you why that's important
so first of all goals the concepts have
been completely enhanced so the
conversion tracking in ga4 is
substantially more flexible so in
conversions instead of 20 you all get 30
conversions instead of 20 you all get 30
conversions
conversions
and more importantly goals in the
previous version of google analytics
were you couldn't delete them you
couldn't reuse them the data was
permanent and those 20 slots were always
the 20 slots you got
in ga4 they allow you to archive these
so you can come in and say i don't want
to use add to cart anymore and it
actually frees up a new slot so you get
a brand new conversion slot that you can
use in the future
use in the future
so why is that important well let's say
your organization does seasonal based
campaigns maybe back to school mother's
campaigns maybe back to school mother's
day
day
black friday or quarterly type of
black friday or quarterly type of
campaigns
campaigns
well if those campaigns have unique
conversions that only apply to when
those campaigns run you can now do
seasonal campaigns get all your
conversion tracking it'll archive the
data when you're done and then it'll
free up a new slot for you to use in the
future so again for the first time you
can support many more conversion use
cases by just having more flexible
cases by just having more flexible
components
components
the other part which is a huge change is
the types of conversions you can create
so a quick example i have an audience
that i built and i built an audience and
i said show me anyone that was on my
i said show me anyone that was on my
blog
blog
and within 10 minutes so here's that
elapsed time within 10 minutes
they got to my contact page
so you can do that with audiences and
you can see i have these 59 users who
completed both of these conditions
but the interesting part for conversions
is google has this new feature in ga4
called audience triggers and with
audience triggers you can create an
event when someone enters your audience
so here i'm saying anytime someone's in
my audience create this event and then
what i can do in my in my events report
is i can mark this audience event as a
is i can mark this audience event as a
conversion
conversion
so the important part is any audience
so the important part is any audience
you create you can make that a
conversion in ga4 so we have audience
based conversions not page not session
but audience based so the types of
advanced conversions you can create
are pretty much limitless so if you're
e-commerce you can have a conversion for
anyone that purchased two or more
products or anyone that purchased fifty
dollars or more products
or anyone in the city of seattle on a
desktop who purchased 50 of products
so if you think about all those types of
so if you think about all those types of
examples those are things again you just
really couldn't do in universal
so the these conversions as well as some
of the elapsed time features are
important because they're also going to
feed in to a lot of the product
integrations i'm about to show you
so those are two of my favorite features
i'll say the third one for anyone that's
a power user or considers themself an
advanced google analytics user
you've never been able to get the data
out of the free version of google
analytics at scale there's apis there's
some google sheet connectors
but for many of you you'll find they're
sampled and they're very limited in the
type of data you can export
so one of the most popular and important
features in the paid version of google
analytics was a bigquery integration
and what google's done with ga4 is
they've taken one of the most important
features the reasons why people upgraded
to the enterprise version and they've
now given it away to all of you uh in
the free version and there's no cost for
that integration for the product linking
itself so if you're not familiar with
bigquery bigquery is a data warehouse
and this is where it's going to export a
copy of your data and you can use
bigquery or in bigquery you could export
that data to wherever you want amazon
microsoft you can do whatever you want
with that data
but the important part is this opens up
your ability to do advanced analytics
you can do predictions you can do
modeling you can integrate your crm and
have pii joined with google analytics
have pii joined with google analytics
data
data
you can do whatever you want with that
data because it's yours and it's in a
data warehouse and you can do things
with it again that just weren't possible
with that universal version
and as a bonus i'll give you one last
cool feature that i feel like is a
hidden one in ga4 but another feature
hidden one in ga4 but another feature
that
that
universal just really couldn't do was
padding so the padding reports in
universal analytics were really
challenging to use
and i think created more confusion than
they ever helped anyone
so in ga4 google's rebuilt padding so if
you haven't seen these padding reports
in here you can do event padding or you
can do page padding by changing your
dimensions or metrics but my hidden tip
or trick is if you go into the pathing
report and you click start over you can
actually do backwards and forwards
pathing so in here you could say maybe i
have a conversion that's really
important for me
and in that conversion it's a certain
event like maybe i want to look at
someone who downloaded something on my
someone who downloaded something on my
site
site
and this backwards pathing allows you to
see what are the previous events they
did prior to that conversion or
what are the previous pages they looked
at prior to that conversion so this
concept of taking your conversion
funnels and then working backwards to
see what were the most common paths that
led your users to
is something again you're just never
going to be able to get at in that
going to be able to get at in that
universal version
so these are some of the key differences
in ga4 versus universal
and again i i share this because a lot
of this is only possible
because google's made the investment in
the new data model and it's moved away
from some of that hit based kind of
architecture we had which made certain
dimensions of metrics incompatible
and again it's just a lot more flexible
in some of the new use cases we can do
so with that those are some of my
favorite features in ga4 i'm happy to
share more tips and tricks on this when
we get to q a but now i want to
transition and cover some of the recent
updates that google's made really
probably in the past three to six months
in ga4
and these new features are going to be
again in three key areas they're gonna
be the new integrations with google
be the new integrations with google
products
products
secondly we're gonna have feature
updates mainly around modeling
predictions and new attribution and then
lastly there's some new 360 features
which i feel like will be
a good fun one to show as well
so let's start with the first pillar
which is going to be the google
which is going to be the google
integrations
integrations
so one huge change is if we go into the
so one huge change is if we go into the
admin
admin
we can see all of the new product links
that are available in ga4
many of these were never available in
universal analytics in the free version
some of these were only available in the
enterprise version that 360 version of
google analytics so for the first time
ever all of you if you use display and
video 360
which is google's dsp
which is google's dsp
for
for
large display and video buys or search
ads 360 for managing search campaigns
across multiple engines like bing yahoo
and google
these products are now available in the
free version at no additional cost
another new one that we'll talk about is
merchant center so if any of you are
ecommerce and use merchant center to
show your products you can now do
conversion exports from ga4 into
merchant center
so it's linking it there
and then in addition google's improved
some of the pre-existing links like
google optimize
so let's start with google optimize so
google optimize is google's a b and
multivariate testing product
this product did link to the previous
version of google analytics but google's
rebuilt the integration for ga4 and also
changed how this integration works to
provide you
with more functionality
so what is that new functionality well
this is my optimize container and i have
it linked to my ga4 property and if we
start to create an experiment so let's
say we wanted to create a test so i'll
say demo
for a webinar let's say we wanted to do
an a b test
the new feature in here is that for the
first time
you can use audiences from google
you can use audiences from google
analytics
analytics
analytics
in
in
in
optimize
optimize
so in here if i go into the audience
targeting rules
these are who do you want to show the
experience to
and this audience feature from google
analytics was only available in the
enterprise version of google optimize
but in ga4 google's taken google
optimize and now given you the ability
to have the audience feature
at no additional cost
so i showed you in ga4 like i created
that crazy audience right so i went in i
went into my reports i have my configure
i have some audiences that i published
so i have an emoji audience based off
pizzas and then i had this blog audience
so in google analytics i said show me an
audience of anyone who viewed my blog
and within 10 minutes they got to my
and within 10 minutes they got to my
contact page
well in google optimize if i wanted to
do an a b test off of that audience i
could do that
and if you didn't know if i go back in
google optimize it's not just about
testing so the classic example for
optimize is to do landing page tests for
paid media
but notice you can also do
but notice you can also do
personalizations
personalizations
so i could come in and instead say i
want to
maybe say this is my blog
maybe say this is my blog
personalization
personalization
personalization
i can select this new personalization
option down here
and in the audience uh tool i can say i
just want this to be those blog users
who viewed that within 10 minutes i'll
apply that here
i could launch the optimize editor
if anyone's never seen the editor for
optimize let's say we wanted to do a
simple change like maybe i want to reorg
my menu nav or maybe i want to try and
change some of these images down here so
i can just drag these around hit my save
and now if i were to actually publish
this personalization live through
this personalization live through
optimize
optimize
only these users those who viewed my
blog and within 10 minutes
would see these changes that i just made
to my website and you can see here in
optimize i have some tests and
personalizations running
if you're just curious what the
integration looks like you can come in
optimize will tell you uh what's winning
uh if you should keep your experiment
uh if you should keep your experiment
uh if you should keep your experiment
running
running
you can see all the performance so here
i test i tested a turtle versus a
pineapple and the turtle dominated in
this experiment that i ran
this experiment that i ran
so
so
this is the optimized integration so the
this is the optimized integration so the
key
key
uh performance uh or improvements are
for the first time you can use audiences
from google analytics in optimize you
weren't able to do that in universal
except in the in the paid version
and then additionally
optimize just like the previous version
of google analytics it's going to export
its data
into the google analytics reports so
you're not limited to just having basic
experimentation statistics
but because it's integrated in google
analytics 4 you can see these events
down here
you can see and analyze the impact of
those experiments on everything you're
collecting in google analytics the
demographics the countries the cities
whatever you want to explore it
integrates seamlessly between these two
integrates seamlessly between these two
products
products
so that's google optimize
the other products that have been
integrated in ga4 are going to be some
of those new enterprise connectors that
were only available in the paid version
but now again and ga4 are available for
but now again and ga4 are available for
everyone
everyone
so if anyone does large display buys or
video buys on youtube google has a
product called dv360 which is a dsp
again for doing large display and video
again for doing large display and video
again for doing large display and video
buys
buys
and the important part here is that
google is going to export all of your
google is going to export all of your
audiences
audiences
audiences
from
from
google analytics into db360 so you can
use these to
bid against to exclude include and this
is going to be the same as google ads so
if you're not using some of the larger
google media products i'm sure all of
you at some point are going to use
google ads and google ads has a very
similar integration so this is also a
huge improvement over the previous
version of google analytics and the
reason it is is if i go into google ads
and i go into my audience manager
inside my audience manager
we're gonna see all of those audiences
that we have so if i expand my rows i
show all the audiences that i'm using
we'll start seeing all my emojis i use
emojis for everything but all of these
are coming from ga4
and the part that's a really big
and the part that's a really big
improvement
improvement
is previously in google analytics you
had to manually share every audience
into every product
so what i mean by that is let's say you
wanted to do an audience of users that
added something to the cart well you
would have to go create that audience
log into ga and then press a bunch of
buttons and then share it
and then if you wanted to create another
audience you would have to do the same
audience you would have to do the same
thing
thing
what ga4 does that's different is all
the audiences you create so if you
create any audience in google analytics
by default it's accessible in all of
these products so all of the audiences
as soon as they're created will
immediately show up in google ads you
don't have to publish them one by one
and then also publish them into optimize
and then kind of duplicate all that work
so all the audiences are instantly
available over there
and then in addition uh in many of these
and then in addition uh in many of these
products like db360 as well as google
ads it's gonna do conversion exports so
it's also going to export your
conversions for enhanced measurement so
search ads 360 is another example of
search ads 360 is another example of
that
that
this integration is also available so if
anyone has never used search ads 360
this is a product that's like an
enterprise version of google ads but
it's actually for multiple search
engines so you can actually manage bing
you can manage google you can manage
multiple search engines in one platform
and same thing in this particular
product once you get into here uh you're
gonna find that you can grab all of your
um conversions and your audiences and
you can use those in the other products
as well
um so this is the big improvement again
it's all automatic and it's not going to
now back to our google integrations
there's a brand new one that was never
available in either version of google
analytics and this one just launched
last week and that's going to be
merchant center
if you've never used merchant center
merchant center is a product mainly for
e-commerce that allows you to manage
your product inventory on google so if
you ever google a product and you see
those organic search results where you
those organic search results where you
have
have
all of those products kind of show up
most of that is managed by google
merchant center
and the key of this integration i don't
have a client or a non-client one that i
can demo but i can tell you what the
features are
the key of this feature is most of the
time in merchant center you're just
looking at impressions and clicks of
your products
but by integrating ga4 it's actually
going to export your conversions
so anyone that clicks on any of those
merchant center results google is going
to auto tag so it's going to add in all
the campaign parameters and then it's
going to export the conversions into
merchant center so if you have purchase
events that's going to show up back in
the merchant center platform so you can
the merchant center platform so you can
start doing attribution and start
optimizing kind of your organic
optimizing kind of your organic
merchant
merchant
results that you're kind of populating
from those products
so again this is a feature that was not
available before and just rolled out
last week
in this new version of ga4
so those are the google integrations uh
there are some pre-existing ones if
anyone has questions on those i'm happy
to cover those in the q a
but google's had ad manager bigquery and
but google's had ad manager bigquery and
some of these other ones for quite some
some of these other ones for quite some
time
time
the ones we just covered are the brand
new ones that google's rolled out
new ones that google's rolled out
recently
recently
so with that let's transition to feature
updates so google's made what i would
say is probably uh three key feature
updates in probably the last three to
six months to ga4
the first is going to be around
the first is going to be around
attribution
attribution
so attribution is always a really
challenging subject because most of us
who have used google analytics
who have used google analytics
and for the for most of our life
are intimately familiar that google
analytics by default uses a last
non-direct attribution model
so what that means is in universal
analytics all of the default reports
are basically last click by default
so ga4 has tried to improve some of the
insights and capabilities we can get
around attribution
so if you've explored or have a ga4
property you've probably seen the
acquisition section
and there's different kind of
attribution capabilities
in different reports
so user acquisition is showing you what
was the first user
source that led to a conversion so you
can come in and if you wanted to do
how did we acquire that user and what
conversion did it lead to
you can easily come in and i could say
for this emoji conversion i have
what was the first traffic source that
led to that conversion
led to that conversion
and this first touch again was something
we really didn't have in universal
we have the standard last uh touch
through the traffic acquisition so this
part has uh uh this will be familiar to
pretty much everyone this is how google
analytics has really always worked
and then we have a new setting so if we
go into the admin
in the admin setting there's a section
called attribution settings
and here there's a setting where you can
change the attribution model for what
change the attribution model for what
the reports use
and there's two key changes here
first google's rolled out data-driven
attribution uh data driven was a feature
that was mainly only available in the
enterprise version of ga360
or a particular beta called the
attribution beta but it wasn't available
kind of in the standard attribution
reports in universal
so google's taken data driven
attribution actually rolled it out as
the default and made it available to
the default and made it available to
everyone
everyone
and then in addition we have the other
attribution models so last first linear
position time or even ads preferred
you can change what the default
attribution model of ga4 is
so i have mine set to data driven and
the way this works is if you go into
your reports
and in your reports you go into events
sorry you go into conversions
in the conversions section as soon as
you click on an event so maybe let's say
i'll click on scroll
i have a scroll conversion
if we look at this report notice
that when we look at the conversions per
channel i'll zoom in
it's not whole numbers there's fractions
in here so 0.56 0.21 0.92
this is the data driven attribution
model where it's actually fractionally
assigning credit uh to the conversions
so once you drill in this is where you
can change the default conversions uh or
the conversion model or attribution
model of google analytics for the first
model of google analytics for the first
time
time
so i could go to my admin
i could go back to the attribution
settings and i could change this to
settings and i could change this to
linear
linear
and some of you might panic because
previously in google analytics when you
did stuff like that it would permanently
change your data so it would only apply
point in time forward and it would be
very destructive
very destructive
that's not the case with ga4
in ga4 i can go back to my reports
i can go back to my conversions
and now in my conversions if i click on
and now in my conversions if i click on
scroll
scroll
what's going to happen now is this is a
linear attribution model so before i had
.59 now i have 0.50 so it's actually
.59 now i have 0.50 so it's actually
divided
divided
all of the uh
credit by linear so it's just splitting
it equally and the reason there's
fractions is if you have only three
fractions is if you have only three
sources that led to a conversion then
each one would have 0.33 because it
would split it right so this shows you
that you can actually change the
attribution model on the fly in ga4 and
there's a lot of settings like that in
ga4 which are designed to not be
destructive like they were
in universal so we talked about goals
like you couldn't delete a goal in
like you couldn't delete a goal in
universal
universal
you can change the reporting identity in
ga4 on the fly it doesn't permanently
change any of your data so that's one
feature i do really like in ga4 is that
you can
change a lot of things on the fly
so that's the attribution feature the
important part there is for the first
time we can change those attribution
time we can change those attribution
models
models
and they're accessible again
on the fly
the other part that's important about uh
conversions so for another feature
update it's gonna be around modeling
so if you all are not familiar with
modeling uh it's gonna be really
important to get comfortable with model
data because uh that's what all of our
market all of us marketers are gonna be
using in this new kind of
privacy-centric uh world that we're
moving into and that we're already in
so what is it about modeling that's
important well there's two key parts
first is google rolled out some updates
last year
where all of the conversions are modeled
by default
by default
so this already happens in google ads it
already happens in facebook because of
safari and other changes where we no
longer have cookies that last they're
stripped down to seven days or even one
stripped down to seven days or even one
day
day
or other certain situations
google now actually models conversions
by default to try and restore some of
the conversion signal loss that's
happening because of the degradation
around cookies so some of that
around cookies so some of that
functionality which has been available
in google ads for quite some time
is now available in ga4 by default so
these conversions will be modeled by
these conversions will be modeled by
default
default
additionally in europe there's a lot of
challenges right now around consent so
and that can happen in other regions as
well but the challenge is
is if you implement a consent platform
and you only track someone in google
analytics when they provide consent
it means the amount of traffic and the
it means the amount of traffic and the
amount of users you're able to track
are usually going to substantially
decrease overnight
so for my clients that implement like a
consent framework they might see more
than 50 of their traffic
lost because they choose to opt out and
not to opt in
and that is a huge challenge because
the importance of google analytics or
analytics in general is to be
directional we want to have it to
provide directional insights so we can
make marketing and advertising decisions
and if all of a sudden we lose 50 of our
traffic there's a good chance that some
of those insights are no longer
directional meaning the data we
collected if we did have all the data to
compare it against some of the increases
and decreases that we were seeing might
not actually align with what the full
data set would have shown so it could
potentially lose out on the
directionalness which again
makes it significantly challenging to
makes it significantly challenging to
use google analytics or any platform to
make decisions
so google's taking a big step forward to
help marketers in this area where
they've implemented something called
consent mode so if anyone hasn't heard
of consent mode all of the features for
consent mode are already available so
you can implement the uh architecture of
consent mode but basically the way it
works is you have a setting where you
can tell google analytics as well as
other google products like google ads
other google products like google ads
when and when it should not use cookies
or identifiers
or identifiers
so
so
in this way you could perhaps have a way
where if a user opts out of google
analytics you decide that you're not
going to track any identifiable
information so you're not going to track
a client id you're not going to track a
user id but you're just going to track
that a page you occurred but really
nothing about that page you
so that's how consent mode works is
so that's how consent mode works is
basically it tracks the data in
aggregate it's going to track all of
your page views but some of those page
views will no longer have an id like a
client id or a user id associated with
client id or a user id associated with
it
it
so what google's doing with consent mode
is they're going to be introducing
behavioral modeling
so behavioral modeling is going to be a
feature where it's going to take the
aggregate data it's going to take all of
the aggregate page use and then that's
going to take your consented data and
it's going to build a model that's
it's going to build a model that's
custom to you and your users and the
data you're collecting and it's going to
model that behavior off of those
aggregates to try and restore the
directionalness behind your data
so the cool part is consent mode is
already available so you can implement
it like in google tag manager or another
tag management system
and the bigquery integration that we
talked about earlier all those consent
flags will show up in bigquery
and then google said that very soon the
and then google said that very soon the
ui is gonna have the behavioral modeling
feature in it so it's gonna help really
solve a lot of those consent challenges
that many of us might be faced with
again when we're working with consent or
in europe or some of those other things
so 95 of the features available we're
just missing the ui feature to be able
to model that data but it's coming soon
and this is why i kind of go back
working with model data is something all
of us are going to have to get very
comfortable with as marketers so we
already have that with conversion
modeling we already have that in many of
our advertising platforms to help with
itp and other changes that have rolled
itp and other changes that have rolled
out
out
and we're gonna have even more model
data when we start working with consent
platforms and other components as well
so it's something not to avoid but it's
gonna actually be a benefit for all of
us in the long term
so one last thing i wanted to show i'm
going to switch accounts real quick to
show this feature
so there's another set of features that
so there's another set of features that
google's rolled out in ga4 so i'm using
the google analytics for demo account uh
google has a free demo account if anyone
wants to play around with ga4 just
google ga4 demo account and you can have
access to this same data set
but what i wanted to show you here is
that google is making significant
investments into predictive capabilities
so for many marketers
you don't have probably a data science
team you don't have resources to go in
and do
a predictive lifetime value or what's
the predictive predictive chance that
someone's going to come back and convert
um you just don't have those resources
available or maybe you just don't have
the time
so what google's trying to do with ga4
is they're trying to give advanced kind
of marketing capabilities uh to everyone
so that you can kind of take advantage
of this and more accurately reach and
target and be more effective with your
budgets and your marketing campaigns
so to show you a little bit about that
so to show you a little bit about that
if you do do e-commerce
google's built a bunch of predictive
capabilities in the platform so if i
come into google analytics and i build a
user segment
inside here you'll actually see we have
many of the predict predictions that are
available by default
available by default
and
and
it looks like
i accidentally lost my demo account so
so let me go back
so let me go back
now that i'm in the demo account for
now that i'm in the demo account for
reals
reals
if i go into explore
i collect segments
we should see
so in here google has a bunch of
so in here google has a bunch of
predictions
predictions
so these predictions are going to be
based off of churn uh likelihood to
convert and a few other kind of key
things and the important part here is
that again they're going to be created
out of the box i'm not sure why they
disappeared i feel like i'm still not in
the demo account so i might have to come
back to this example
something always goes wrong in demos
so let me try it a different way so if i
go to explore i go to the template
go to explore i go to the template
gallery
gallery
we have a predictive top spenders
we have a predictive top spenders
workbook
workbook
and in here you can see out of the box
if i open this predictive top spenders
if i open this predictive top spenders
workbook
workbook
workbook
google's building predictive revenue
so based off of who's coming from a
channel for the first time it's
predicting how much revenue they're
actually going to be worth out of the
box and the important part here now i
can see it so now if i click on a new
can see it so now if i click on a new
segment
segment
you can see i have these predictive
segments down here so these are the
predictions out of the box
so you can do who's likely to purchase
in the next seven days
who's likely to not visit you again in
the next seven days who's gonna be your
top spenders who's gonna be a first-time
purchaser or someone who's not likely to
purchase in the next seven days
so the way these work
is google basically does all of the hard
data science work for you
behind the scenes
so here it's saying i want to look at
anyone with a per purchase probability
that's in the 90th percentile
so what google does is it looks at
various signals what's the traffic
source maybe what's their geography
how many pages did they look at and then
based off of their own kind of custom
engagement of users who converted
it looks at the commonality in those
it looks at the commonality in those
conversions
conversions
and then looks at their first visit and
it tries to identify
for someone new that's coming to the
site what do they have in common with
the users we already know who have
the users we already know who have
purchased
purchased
and the cool part here is you can
actually come in and you can customize
these predictions so you can say i don't
want to just look at the top 10 of my
users who are most likely to convert
maybe i want to change this and say i
want the top 20
so you can actually play with the
sliders for your prediction scores so
you can have more or less audiences
but one key uh benefit of this is let's
go back to google ads
let's say you're a small marketer and
you want to you know be more savvy and
you have a limited ad budget
and one of the hard parts of a limited
ad budget is you don't have enough
budget to show ads to all of your
budget to show ads to all of your
qualified users
qualified users
so
so
one thing you would probably want to
make sure you're doing is you're not
showing ads to users who are likely to
showing ads to users who are likely to
convert
convert
because it's wasted ad budget you want
to save that ad budget to try and get
users who are close to converting but
not very likely to convert or maybe even
just focus on people who are
even less qualified than that
so the way you could use this is say
maybe i want to take my users who are 50
to 80 percent likely to convert
and if i create that as a conversion or
as an audience this will immediately
show up in google ads and i could do bid
adjustments against this audience or i
could take that audience that's 80 or
higher and i could exclude them from
seeing ads i could actually apply an
exclusion condition to them and you can
also build that as different tests you
could just try running a test in google
ads and then see if it had any impact to
your roads but this again opens up an
your roads but this again opens up an
ability for marketers who don't have a
data science team to be more savvy so
right now unfortunately a lot of these
predictions that we looked at are
centered around e-commerce but i would
fully expect that google rolls out other
predictive capabilities for different
predictive capabilities for different
verticals
verticals
hopefully later this year so this is
another kind of a key improvement in ga4
so with that i did want to show one last
feature so we've talked about the google
integrations we've talked about some of
the core feature updates the last one i
just wanted to show you is a new feature
called rollups and sub properties
unfortunately this feature is only going
to be available in the enterprise
to be available in the enterprise
version
version
i personally hope that google changes
that at some point and gives users and
the free version uh some of
at least a certain amount of these uh in
the basic version so we'll have to see
what google does in the long term
but i'll start with sub properties so i
created these off of emojis like i do
everything but sub properties is a new
feature that solves a challenge that
many of us have in the free version of
ga4 which is you can't create views we
don't have views like we did in
don't have views like we did in
universal
universal
so views maybe you had a property in
google analytics where you had it on
your entire website so you're tracking
all the webs all the web behavior
and every page someone sees
it was very common historically to
create views so you could have a view of
only your blog or only your career site
or only your us traffic or only your
traffic in canada
and in ga4
we don't really have a concept of views
so sub properties is google's kind of
view level replacement feature or a view
level uh kind of proxy
and the way this feature works is you
can come in and i'll just show you if i
were to create a brand new property it
asks you whether you want to create a
regular property or a sub property and a
sub property what it is is it's a server
side property that basically creates a
copy of the data you're collecting
in a a new property so
if i can get this to work
what should show up here is it should
show me a filter so let me show you this
a different way since that appears to be
a different way since that appears to be
broken
broken
if i go into my sub property management
i have one set up to only track traffic
from my blog
and that one also appears to not be
and that one also appears to not be
working
working
here we go so
i'll do it one more time
now if i create property i go to sub
property this is what the filter looks
like so you give it a name
so i could say i only want to track my
blog i'll call this v2
i select where do i want the data to
come from so i want to come from my main
website where i'm tracking all of my
website where i'm tracking all of my
data
data
and then the key here is you add a
filter so in the filter you say what
data do you want to filter in or to
exclude or include into this property
so a simple example was you could say i
want anything with a page path
that contains blog
and if i were to hit apply and save this
then in google analytics in my account
selector if i go here i have my full
selector if i go here i have my full
property
property
so this would be all of my data about my
so this would be all of my data about my
website
website
and then the sub property would only be
the traffic from my blog so it's that
filtered kind of view where these 4 200
users are just my blog
and then in the total if i go to the
main property i have all the traffic for
my blog and everywhere else on my
my blog and everywhere else on my
website
website
so if you're on the free version uh you
won't have sub properties so the main
way to
to kind of do the slices that you would
do in the past is going to be through
applying audiences
so there's really robust audience
features and then there's data studio
but again i hope google takes the sub
properties and makes them available
kind of more broadly
but that's how sub properties work
roll ups are going to be pretty much
exactly the same so if i showed you what
a rollup was that's where if i click
create property i go to roll up
i could say this is my combined
view so maybe i have one property for my
app traffic and another property for my
web traffic and maybe i have multiple
web traffic and maybe i have multiple
brands maybe i have kate spade i have
brands maybe i have kate spade i have
coach
coach
and i actually manage different brands
as a single company
well a roll up just allows you to come
in and select all of your individual
in and select all of your individual
properties
properties
and then it'll combine it together so in
my pizza plus pineapple up here this is
a roll up of multiple properties that i
have running on the adsworth
site and it just again combines all that
data into a global place so the nice
part is is this is all server side so
part is is this is all server side so
you're not adding additional tags to the
website to track data in different
places google does it for you all kind
of behind the scenes
so with that those are kind of the key
features i wanted to go through so again
i showed you all
the key differences of why we're talking
about ga4 versus universal
we talked about the new integrations so
google has improved integrations
personally i think the google optimize
integration is one of the more exciting
ones because we have the new google
ones because we have the new google
audiences that are now available
natively and optimized to do
personalization against so if anyone's
running google ads campaigns not only
can you use it for landing page but you
can also use it to personalize the
experience as well
we talked about the feature updates i'm
really looking forward to the behavioral
modeling feature to help with a lot of
the consent challenges in emea
and then in addition we're starting to
see some of the power google analytics
has around having flexible attribution
and then we're also starting to see some
of the improvements google's making to
their enterprise offering so those rule
opposition sub properties are also
starting to come online as well
so with that
we will be sending a bunch of resources
to everyone here these are also
available on our blog but if you're new
to ga4 we have get started guides we
also have a variety of webinars where we
talk about all the differences between
universal and ga4 so if you want to
learn more we have those
learn more we have those
in addition if anyone's looking for help
we've helped over a hundred companies
move and implement uh ga4 so if anyone
needs help getting started definitely
feel free to contact us after we can do
ga4 implementations all day long
and with that i wanted to transition to
the q a so let me pop up the q a uh i
don't have a hard stop so all of you can
hang on for as long as you like
but i'm gonna try and get through as
so someone said that the uh webinar was
only in
stereo so that's funny i'll have to look
at that after
a question was on when the ga4 depart or
sorry when the universal deprecation was
was it in july of 2022 or july of 2021
so it's going to be july of 2022 so you
so it's going to be july of 2022 so you
have
have
have
more than 13 months to get ready for
this new version of google analytics
before again universal stops processing
new data
so again you want to get started with
ga4 to build up that historical data
a question from chris uh the data
structure in ga4 is different than
universal especially in bigquery how
should power users
plan on mirroring the ga4 interface and
automated reporting using bigquery
ga4 data sets
so if you're trying to mirror reports
between ga and bigquery
my guess is that right now it's a it's
it's it's kind of manual because there's
not a lot of tutorials that are
not a lot of tutorials that are
available
available
i'm gonna guess in the next three to six
months there's gonna be a blog post and
queries that you can just copy uh with a
simple google search so for power users
i would probably recommend holding off
before manually going in and building
all of your bigquery uh reports off of
all of your bigquery uh reports off of
that
that
because someone's going to save you a
lot of time later by doing that all work
for you
but if you do want to get started
there's some really great resources i
know simo has a bunch of blog posts on
know simo has a bunch of blog posts on
it
it
our colleagues luca and andre write
about bigquery on our sites a lot
but there's definitely great places to
get started aaron you asked can we
import 360 data into ga4
unfortunately since ga4 is a very
different data model than the previous
version of google analytics
google doesn't have a historical data
import feature so there's no way to
import historical data into ga4
um so if you did want to connect ga4
with historical data the best way to do
that is going to be inside that
marketing data warehouse we talked about
so if you export your ga4 data into
bigquery uh you'll have all that raw
data and then if you're on the 360
data and then if you're on the 360
version of google analytics today you
also have data in bigquery and you can
actually connect the cookies uh or if
you're on the free version uh there's a
bunch of tools you can use to export
aggregate data out so you could export
that data again and then try and uh
uh there's a question from david could
we use data studio to blend ga3s to
blend universal analytics with ga4
to uh combine a complete view of data
so you could use data studio to do
blends between both versions of google
analytics uh personally i would probably
find it a bit challenging to do that
so what i'm advising my customers to do
is ideally uh most of us are still using
universal as our primary solution like
personally i use universal for probably
90 plus
of what i do
and i use ga4 for about 10 of things i
and i use ga4 for about 10 of things i
use it for some of the new funnels some
of the new padding
but personally there's lots of things
that i'm waiting for google to release
on the roadmap and make easier but what
i'm doing is i'm doing the
implementation for ga4 so i'm collecting
data in both places
and then my plan is sometime next year
when i'm ready and i feel like i can get
everything i need in ga4
i'll start moving over to just doing
things in ga4
instead of doing it in both
and the part there is as soon as ga4 has
like 13 months of data you no longer
probably need to connect it to universal
so you'd only need to bridge the two
versions probably if you have less than
13 months of data
and for me personally i'm just going to
wait until ga4 has enough data where i
feel like i don't necessarily need to
connect it to the previous version at
connect it to the previous version at
all
is there a way to archive 360 data so if
you're on the 360 version of google
analytics aaron absolutely you just set
analytics aaron absolutely you just set
up your bigquery integration and then
that will be available in your data
warehouse for as long as you want it to
warehouse for as long as you want it to
be
be
eli asked are additional custom metrics
and dimensions expected to be made
available these are far fewer in ga4
available these are far fewer in ga4
um
um
you're asking can we get session scoped
and what's our recommendation for
replacing existing session scoped so
session scoped custom dimensions as well
as product scopes custom dimensions are
missing in ga4 we don't have those yet
however google has promised that those
are coming so we'll have both of those
session and both of those custom
dimension scopes that you're used to
available hopefully sometime soon in ga4
so i would just recommend waiting
and then for additional custom
dimensions and metrics
there are differences in the free and
the paid version so for some reason if
you use all of them uh the enterprise
version would have more slots that you
uh chris you said if an organization was
very dependent on universal would we be
able to use
server side to continue to send data to
server side to continue to send data to
universal
universal
after those dates
that google shared
so that's not going to work
unfortunately because the processing
will cut off the processing from all
data sources into
into google analytics
so uh
basically universal uh you'll only be
able to access the data in it after
those dates in 2023 but you won't be
able to collect new data
i'm doing a lot of work with server side
but not necessarily for that reason
someone asked i saw an event with emojis
is that possible so
you can send them emojis as events all
day long i i definitely encourage it
uh someone asked on audience conversions
can you use the source from utms so
someone that lands from facebook so
that's a question from eric
so for audience conversions you could
absolutely use the source
so if you want to create a conversion of
anyone that came from facebook
in the audience builder you would just
select a source of facebook
and then for medium you could either do
paid organic social or both depending on
what type of uh
facebook source it is
uh jeremy asked do audience-based events
also export to bigquery so we created
also export to bigquery so we created
the audience of people who viewed my
blog and within 10 minutes they got to
my contact page
that will definitely export to bigquery
that will definitely export to bigquery
so
so
i have some customers that are using
bigquery as like a customer data
bigquery as like a customer data
platform
platform
so basically since it's a data warehouse
you can dump all of your first party
data from ga in there
and let's say you connected your data
warehouse like bigquery to your email
platform like let's say mailchimp or
salesforce marketing cloud
you could actually
use those audience events and then
activate kind of other marketing
activities for those so you can do super
advanced stuff based off that
uh christopher you asked has google made
any announcements about other location
hosting capabilities so google did a
privacy webinar last week and they did
make some announcements there wasn't a
lot of details in them but basically
they said there was going to be new
features based off of recent rulings in
europe to do regional based compliance
and then it also mentioned there's going
to be more updates to ip address
so it'll have more control over not
using ip addresses that sounds like at
all or
severely limited or differently than how
it works today
um so anyways google made announcements
around that and we're expecting to
hopefully hear some news on that in the
coming weeks so stay tuned
uh we will have a recording
there's a question felipe asked google
analytics 4 frequently applies a
threshold to custom reports why is this
happening so let me switch the ga4
because this is something that often
frustrates me so i'll show you why that
happens and also give you a kind of a
quick tip if all of you are getting
started with ga4
in the admin uh there is two settings
for reporting identity and in the
reporting identity you can have it
report off of the anonymous id so this
is going to be the cookie
or the new identity which could be user
ids so if you have someone log into your
website you can send those user ids
or you can even use google signals
google signals is google's cross device
graph so these are signed in google
users where google will try and connect
cross behave across device behavior
based off of that
if you use this option
as your default reporting identity what
you're going to start seeing as you
start interacting with various reports
start interacting with various reports
in google analytics is you'll notice
this yellow triangle that says
thresholding has been applied
so because if i go back to this setting
this setting is using google's cross
device graph it's also making sure that
individual users aren't being identified
so it's removing basically very low
volume rows from the reports
volume rows from the reports
so
so
you have two options uh if you don't
want your reports to be thresholded or
you find it annoying then switch to
device only
or turn off google signals those are
going to be the two options there uh
personally i mostly use device only
right now and i'm hoping google in the
future gives us an ability to actually
have a third option here of just user id
and device id um which i think would
give us the best of both worlds
uh how would i compare path exploration
to adobe analytics um so i think
fundamentally it's pretty similar i have
fundamentally it's pretty similar i have
heard that the adobe reports are a
little bit more sophisticated or
advanced in certain areas
um but my hope is that google releases a
lot of updates to make them even more
comparable in the future
jessica asked we utilize product scope
custom dimensions will those ever become
custom dimensions will those ever become
available
available
google's promised that they're coming
i'm also waiting so hopefully we'll have
those soon
muhammad asked will data and ga4 be all
user audience based no longer session
based data at all um so that's a common
misconception of google analytics in
that it's not session based or doesn't
have session based capabilities
so i'll give you some examples if we go
into acquisition we go in the traffic
into acquisition we go in the traffic
acquisition
acquisition
uh you have sessions available out of
the box so right here sessions are
available in ga4
and additionally if i go back to the
audience section and we wanted to build
an audience we can create session scoped
audiences as well and in fact there's
audiences as well and in fact there's
even another option so if i create this
custom audience uh i'm sorry let me go
into explore
in the explore section in these custom
in the explore section in these custom
audiences
audiences
you have session scoped right here but
you also have event scoped so this was
something you couldn't do in universal
analytics you could only do show me all
users or show me all sessions where
something happened
in ga4 you can do
what a lot of people in adobe always
like to brag about you could do event
scope segments only show me the events
where something occurred so not only do
we have session scopes but we also have
event scoped as well
uh same question i know that sessions
are now tracked differently but how are
they different what defines a session in
they different what defines a session in
ga4
ga4
so sessions are mostly similar
it's still by default up to 30 minutes
of inactivity is what a session is you
can also customize that
there are differences where in some of
the advanced attribution capabilities
actually having a new traffic source no
longer break sessions
longer break sessions
so
so
for some of the attribution kind of
pathing reports it's even more flexible
from a session perspective but largely
it's similar
a question from jeff as we move from ua
to ga4 should we stream from both
versions to bigquery so if you're on
ga360 i would absolutely recommend you
set up both uh one big change in ga4 is
set up both uh one big change in ga4 is
the the bigquery does not backfill so in
universal analytics if you did have the
bigquery integration it would do a
historical export but in ga4 it only
exports point in time forward so
definitely basically on day one if you
can set up your bigquery integration
there's questions here about how could
bigquery create engagement time metrics
so select unnest
we can share some tips and tricks with
that after the webinar
our google optimize conversions felipe
asked based off of users or event count
so the google optimized conversions if i
go in here i'll just show you what the
conversions look like so here it's going
to be off of the events but we also have
a concept of the client so you have the
user and the event and then it also
tells you how many events so as an
example if i say i'm looking at scrolls
i can see there is on average 5.4
i can see there is on average 5.4
scrolls
scrolls
per client so it gives you kind of all
three slices of that
anna great to see you you asked about
amp so google i think on their github
repository said amp support is coming
but they posted that in december and i
haven't heard anything about amp since
then so
i hope it comes but haven't heard any
i hope it comes but haven't heard any
updates
updates
will there be any integrations with
google ad manager so there is a gam
connector but it's mostly app only
uh i hope google has a gam integration i
i haven't seen any announcements on that
uh there's a question here on expiration
so someone's asking how does the
expiration settings work in ga4 this is
a really important setting
um and this will often
trip up a lot of people so if you take
anything away from this webinar maybe
remember this one tip
ga4 by default has a data retention
ga4 by default has a data retention
setting
setting
so if you go into ga4 and we go into
data settings there's a new data
retention setting
by default when you create a new
property it's set to two months by
property it's set to two months by
default
default
and you can change it in the free
version to up to 14 months and then in
the 360 version you have these
additional options so in the free
version you have either two months or 14
version you have either two months or 14
months
months
if you leave it at two months
what that means is that the raw kind of
tables get dropped after two months so
the aggregates will always be there so
this is an important change in ga4
there's basically two
sets of capabilities in the product
there's the standard reports and then
there's the free form or the advanced
reports as you might call it so standard
reports and freeform reports
these standard reports the data will
always be available in here even after
the expiration
the expiration
but the challenge is the standard
reports are a lot more limited in the
types of analysis you can do those
funnels those pathing reports a lot of
those cool features i showed you
those are not in the standard reports
those features are all in this
explorations report
and that data retention setting affects
how much data you have to use inside the
explorations module
so if you leave your data retention
setting at two months it means you only
have two months of data to work with and
i hope google changes the property setup
to highlight that setting more because i
feel like a lot of people get surprised
that that's what's happening that they
can't access more than two months of
can't access more than two months of
data
data
so it's something definitely to watch
out for
so one
tip check your data retention setting
and change it if it makes sense for your
business and two make sure you enable
the bigquery integration uh to also give
you more coverage as well
you more coverage as well
uh
uh
someone has to sleep it will have a
someone has to sleep it will have a
recording don't worry is there any
deadline for ga4 for 360 properties so
for 360 uh it's going to be october so
you get an extra three months the free
version stops pro stops processing in
july and the 360 version stops
processing in october
a question on rogue referrals is the
issue resolved in ga4 so ga uh rogue
referrals is an issue that commonly
happens with single page apps which was
a real challenge in universal analytics
ga4 tries to make it easier to solve for
that challenge with a new setting in
enhanced measurement so if anyone hasn't
ever used enhanced measurement
this is a new setting ga4 has so in the
admin when you create ga4 for the first
admin when you create ga4 for the first
time
time
it actually does auto tracking out of
the box
and that auto tracking out of the box
if i can get this to work
it actually will track scrolls page
views videos without you having to do
anything like in google tag manager and
for single page apps this box right here
is usually checked where it'll track
browser history events by default so
that's one way google tries to solve for
the rogue referral issue and then in
addition there's lots of great blog
posts like cmo and others have on how to
manually do that so conceptually the
custom dimensions are available
you can access data
uh do you know whether google will allow
search console on the sub property level
in the future so let me double check
uh yeah i'm not sure about sub
uh yeah i'm not sure about sub
properties
properties
so it looks like we don't have search
console at a sub property level we only
have google ads right now so i hope in
the future that google will allow that
the future that google will allow that
so it's a good feature request
there's a question on adsense or add x
there's a question on adsense or add x
so
so
amanda adsense adex and gam for web are
all missing so
hopefully we'll have that maybe by the
end of the year but i haven't heard
do you know when we'll get more
e-commerce list attribution and other
reports so e-commerce is another area i
think that google's still improving
there are some dimensions and metrics
which aren't auto-registered by default
which can be a bit frustrating so i
would expect to see more changes than
that in the rest of the year
benjamin you asked when we change the
attribution model in ga does it impact
the bigquery data that we're exporting
and it would not bigquery is only going
to export the raw data so there's not
really a concept of attribution that's
applied in the in the raw
data so that's somewhere where you
actually have to rebuild some of that if
you wanted to do that in your data
warehouse
the question is the attribution model
only for conversion data
or can we use different types of
attribution so here's something that
some of you might find that's fun
if we go into the attribution
modeling section so in ga4 there's a
whole section called advertising
and in here you have model comparison
and you also have conversion paths so
this used to be like multi-channel
funnels where we can see all the paths
that led to a conversion
that led to a conversion
your ability to segment has been
substantially increased in ga4 so if we
click this add a filter button you can
actually cre
isolate the conversion pass for
audiences or for a variety of other
conditions the multi-channel funnels
area of universal was much more rigid
where you didn't necessarily have all of
these dimensions like saying show me
anyone that purchased more than fifty
dollars a product and show me all of
their conversion paths those
is the attribution based on the
conversion level or a cohort
it's all based on the conversion but
some of it's modeled is the answer to
some of it's modeled is the answer to
that
that
is there a difference between
conversions and purchases slash
transactions in ga4 uh conceptually
there are two different metrics but the
way they're incremented is exactly the
way they're incremented is exactly the
same
by editing the conversion model it
doesn't change for google ads that's
doesn't change for google ads that's
doesn't change for google ads that's
correct
correct
uh can we look at attribution model side
by side so great question alan and since
i'm in here if you click on model
i'm in here if you click on model
comparison
comparison
you can compare your different
attributions side by side
directly in this model comparison report
so i could take uh last click and then
compare it to linear and then on the
right hand side it shows me the
right hand side it shows me the
conversions
conversions
and the differences here so organic
social just got 16 percent less credit
and linear
and that means something else got 16
and that means something else got 16
and that means something else got 16
more
more
uh someone asked how i got emojis in the
report i just added an emoji in google
tag manager
um unless i missed it channel reporting
was demonstrated but not session and
medium so in ga4 if we go to reports and
you go to acquisition uh by default
google now kind of defaults to channels
i hope that we get custom channels that
would be awesome but for your question
uh we have all of the standard source
mediums in the drop down so in the
standard reports if you just click the
dimension many reports in ga4 have other
primary dimensions you can choose so if
you wanted to do your utm medium or just
the medium in general you can just grab
uh well conversions exported be based
off of event count yep they're all the
event counts by default
what is the difference between ga4 and
firebase so conceptually uh google
analytics for firebase and ga4 or one on
the same
uh in fact if you implement a firebase
project now you have to use ga4 as the
analytics component inside firebase
uh and when you look at what happened
with app plus web and it transitioning
to ga4 google just took the firebase
data model and made it ga4 so i view
them pretty much as one on the same
them pretty much as one on the same
and
and
can we change the attribution model in
can you please clarify when conversions
are modeled versus they're not
so if you're using the raw data in your
bigquery none of that's going to be
modeled but when you're in the ui and
you're in some of the conversion reports
they will be modeled i can try and grab
the help center article for you
it's a little bit opaque right now i
hope google makes this easier
um so i'll give you like one feature
request that i asked google to do so i
showed you all how if i go into my main
property we can access those flexible
conversion models right we go into
engagement we go into conversions and as
soon as i click into one of these i'm
using the attribution model that i set
at my property level
what i hope google does is i hope they
add tool tips so that when you hover
over these you can actually see what
attribution model you're using
and then you can also better understand
when things are being modeled so that's
a feature request i have
for hopefully google will make that
for hopefully google will make that
easier
easier
there's a question about uh from um
there's a question about uh from um
uh
uh
daniel who asked
what about the future of ga4 and server
side do we think that all tags in the
future will be in
gtm server side so
the thing about server side is a lot of
people i think don't realize most
marketing is dependent on cookies that
have to exist in the client-side browser
so if you want to find someone on the
internet later to show them advertising
or to do personalization and other parts
like that
most of that is still dependent on
most of that is still dependent on
cookies
cookies
so at least for today and probably for
you know the next year or so
some component of client side tagging is
still going to be very prevalent for
most marketers because again we want to
find them and reach them later
but with everything that is happening
there is starting to be a lot of
adoption in the server side and even
bridged solutions where maybe some of
your ga4 implementation is client-side
and other parts are server-side so i
think there is a future where
server-side starts to become more and
more dominant and we're starting to see
some of the move there but it still
feels pretty early
uh benedict asked is the data modeled in
bigquery it is not it is the raw data
how will ga4 work when google removes
the use of third-party cookies so ga4 at
least from a foundational perspective
will be largely unimp impacted by
third-party cookies because its default
identifier is a first-party cookie
the third-party cookie deprecation
heavily impacts advertising platforms
so in google that's going to be their
display platforms or facebook ads that
are offside facebook
are offside facebook
most kind of display
most kind of display
buys
buys
all use third-party cookies so some of
the advertising integrations might be
infected but also know that google and
all the other advertising platforms as
well as
all the other industry
kind of
groups are working on certain proposals
for what will replace a third-party
cookie just no one's agreed on what
that's going to be yet google just
rolled out topics api as their most
recent one so it will remain to be seen
recent one so it will remain to be seen
what's going to kind of bridge the
advertising integrations but ga will
largely be unimpacted by third-party
largely be unimpacted by third-party
cookies
cookies
uh bart asked can we fix data
retroactively in ga4 uh nope not yet but
that would be a great feature request
i would love that you can fix it in
bigquery just not the ui
uh fernanda asked are the consent pings
being recorded inside ga4 so right now
it's showing up in the bigquery
integration so it's it's uh i guess you
could say it's being recorded it's just
not being shown in the ui so that
behavioral modeling feature we talked
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someone asked how is this an effective
solution today if if google's rolling
out all these new features and changes
so great question joseph i would say
again i'm not approaching ga4 as a
replacement at least for me quite yet to
universal i'm preparing for it to be the
replacement but for my day-to-day i'm
still heavily using universal analytics
and my hope is is that you know as the
as the dates come closer till july of
next year um
it'll be a lot easier and it'll just
make sense it'll kind of just be
intuitive when the right times to move
over the most important part right now
for marketers and for
the 300 plus of you who are still on
here uh you want to implement the data
to start collecting so you have it for
later it doesn't mean you have to drop
everything and start using ga4
from the start
from the start
uh
uh
can we can we reuse our bigquery project
for ga4 you sure can
your computer or let's see
is predictions only available for
is predictions only available for
purchases
purchases
uh so there is churn predictions
but almost all of the predictions are
ecommerce only so hopefully that gets
ecommerce only so hopefully that gets
added
added
uh deleting events so data deletion is
another huge improvement in ga4 so
google rolled out completely new data
deletion features uh so the user data
deletion in particular has been uh
substantially improved so if you ever do
need to delete data it shouldn't be as
destructive as it was in universal
um do we know when the optimize
integration is going to be available to
everyone it already is so if you go into
optimize you can link it to ga4 from
optimize you can link it to ga4 from
today
today
um how do you deal with loss of
e-commerce data because of consent
opt-outs uh consent mode is google's
answer to that
do we have cross-domain tracking in ga4
we sure do if we go into the admin
section of ga4 and you go into i believe
your data streams we click on your
streams at the very bottom there's more
tagging settings and in here you can
configure your domains for cross-domain
measurement so this is a big change
previously cross-domain was technical
previously cross-domain was technical
stuff where you had to go change google
tag manager
and go through all these hoops
in ga4 you just list your domains here
and ga4 does the cross domain
automatically directly in the ui
uh sub properties was only ga360.
we will share the presentation actually
we probably won't share their
presentation because i don't have
anything in it but we will share the
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how do you backup universal data for
free accounts so the backup is something
a lot of people are asking about right
a lot of people are asking about right
now
now
so it's likely going to be something if
you want to back up the data that you
have in universal it's going to be
through the google analytics api
and it's going to be storing that data
in like google sheets or maybe a
database so my guess is in the next
three to six months there's going to be
a variety of people in the community
potentially even google that are going
to release some options to get some of
to release some options to get some of
your data out of the version right now
so if you can i'd probably wait a little
bit before you invest in exporting data
just because it's going to get
just because it's going to get
simplified
simplified
someone asked about the cost for sub
properties so when you use a sub
property or a rollup in ga360 there is
additional cost uh so everything you
send to the sub property or the roll up
is an additional half of an event
so the standard version of
ga4360 includes up to 25 million events
in the base version
and then there's variable pricing if you
go above that so they'll just be
overages and it'll be charged as a half
hit for everything you send to those
hit for everything you send to those
features
features
amanda you asked about the key
differences between uh 360 and ga4
so let me see if i can pull that up real
so let me see if i can pull that up real
quick
quick
so the honest answer is there's really
not a whole lot right now but i'm
guessing it's going to change throughout
the year so mainly the differences
between the free and the paid version
are first you get more of everything and
those are generally around limits more
audiences more conversion so 50 instead
of 30. but notice there's no real
integrations that are only in the paid
version it's very different to how the
360 version works with universal
the biggest advantages right now is the
sampling so in the explore module you
get significantly higher sampling rates
which you need for large data sets
and then the bigquery export is
and then the bigquery export is
unlimited
unlimited
in the enterprise version and it also
includes an sla so those are the main
differences right now there's probably
going to be a lot more that kind of come
online throughout the year
um there's a question from adam we're a
360 paid subscriber i've heard we can
only do 50. so if you're on the version
of 360 today you can upgrade to the ga4
360 at no additional cost there's a free
beta for it
you just need to go into your platform
home or ask google or your reseller or
us to help you enable it but there's a
free beta right now for anyone that's
using ga360 for ga4 and once you're on
that beta you can have these higher
limits so you wouldn't have 50 uh custom
dimensions you'd have 125.
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is there any plans for the explore tab
to have a longer look back window
so the look back window is your data
retention setting so adam you just need
to change that data retention setting
um thanks for the feedback
the behavioral flow report is going to
be your pathing report that we talked
about victor
can you activate ga4 to start building
history while still using universal so
michelle absolutely that's what i'm
doing again i only spend 10 percent of
my time in ga4 i spend most of my time
still in universal
can you confirm that ga360 users have
until at least um october until data is
no longer collected that's right that's
correct rich october first of next year
and then you have at least six months
after where you can still log into the
after where you can still log into the
ui
ui
someone asked about managing users so
google has all the manage user features
in here and they've actually enhanced
them so if you need to manage users um
you can do that at either a sub property
or a property level and then google's
or a property level and then google's
added new controls where if you add a
new user you can actually restrict what
sort of data they have access to so no
revenue no cost and then all the
is there a reason i don't use google
signals so i share that nolan i don't
like the thresholding that i run into so
i use device id quite a bit in ga4
uh google ad manager hopefully coming
uh google ad manager hopefully coming
later
later
later
what are the risks of running both at
the same time uh there's really no risk
there's a slight performance like really
slight performance maybe concern you
could have because you're running two
tags on your site at the same time
however they're both asynchronous so the
actual page impact should be nothing um
so by far the vast majority of our 360
customers are running both at the same
customers are running both at the same
time
time
brent you asked can we get certified in
google analytics for so google analytics
i'm sorry google uh hasn't rolled out a
certification test yet
and they also haven't really rolled out
training uh yet so i would expect there
to be a new certification and a lot more
to be a new certification and a lot more
training
training
throughout this year
there's a question josh asked do we have
to set up tags
so if you have google tag manager which
you said you did
you do need to go in gtm and add the new
ga4 tags the good news is is if anyone
has google analytics in google tag
has google analytics in google tag
manager the old version
then google tag manager makes it pretty
easy to implement ga4 because you just
go into google tag manager and you remap
things into the ga4 structure
uh jason asked about channel definitions
if we can change that on the fly so
hopefully once we get custom channels
it'll work work the same
there's a question on campaign manager
360. that integration isn't available
yet so
hopefully we'll see something on that
later this year
later this year
uh what level of access do you need to
change over an account so you need edit
change over an account so you need edit
access
access
uh to be able to do that
view viewers can see it and analysts
can actually create things so if you
want people to change property settings
are conversion rates elevated i haven't
seen conversion rates being elevated
it's just
channels and remember
itp calls can caused conversion loss so
itp calls can caused conversion loss so
a lot of the modeling features are
restoring not necessarily inflating
uh you're asking about user dimensions
like logged and logged out does that get
applied to all events so
we do have users user scoped custom
dimensions in ga4
those are going to be inside your custom
definitions and if you want something
that's user scoped you can see here i
have one for isimo visiting my website
and you just click create custom
dimension you'll say you want that as
user scoped and then once you save that
it's available for everything
uh thank you
can we combine if we have multiple
can we combine if we have multiple
websites
websites
yep you can have separate and combine
yep you can have separate and combine
them
them
do events configured and ga4 show up in
bigquery they sure do
why is it important that conversions
populate wouldn't that be more helpful
in google ads someone's asking about
merchant center
and why we want our conversions in
merchant center or you can also ask that
question why would we want the ga4
conversions in google ads
so conceptually there's two reasons one
is it unifies things on a common
conversion pipeline so the same
conversions show up in all of your
different platforms so you're not
tracking them differently and secondly
you can be more agile so previously with
merchant center or google ads you
actually had to deploy floodlights and
all sorts of other
google ads conversion pixels to measure
all that
with ga4 you can actually set up a lot
of this without necessarily needing to
go back to your site and add new tags so
it's not only more agile but also the
types of conversions you can create are
much more sophisticated
donald you ask are there any big changes
with ga4 and first party cookies
no not with first party cookies first
party cookies or cookies
the bigger change is the google signals
so you do have the cross device graph if
you don't have a lot of logged in users
so dana you asked about campaign manager
will that no longer be a linking option
will that no longer be a linking option
uh i'm
pretty sure google is going to roll out
a comp campaign manager integration
that's just not available yet
uh merchant center
uh merchant center
um
um
um
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limit
limit
limit
july
july
yeah july 2023 is when it goes away
can we see top conversion pass so we
talked about that that was available
inside advertising
and
someone asked can i use page and
sessions in ga4
so the answer to that is absolutely we
can use page and sessions in ga4
can use page and sessions in ga4
so
so
if i go into my content reports i go
into pages and screens
it's not just pages and sessions um so i
can create a custom report i actually
created a tweet about that but you can
also even use conversions so in
universal analytics conversions was
something that never worked with pages
and for the first time you can actually
use your conversions
deprecation a lot of people called me on
that it's so it's 20 23 so sorry not
that it's so it's 20 23 so sorry not
2022.
2022.
uh someone asked what's the replacement
for custom dimensions in ga4 uh there
are custom dimensions in ga4 just like
they are in universal so same thing in
all right
with that i think we've pretty much
covered everything
so what we're going to do is we're going
to follow up with the recording as i
promised we're also going to follow up
with some resources to help you all get
started with ga4
and then we're going to have more kind
of educational material if you don't
have a ga4 property i think we'll do an
upcoming webinar where we'll actually
show you how to configure and set it up
and get you some real experience so stay
tuned for that
but other than that you can find me on
but other than that you can find me on
twitter or linkedin i talk about ga4
pretty much non-stop so thanks everyone
for joining
and i look forward to seeing you on the